The internet is now dominated by step-family porn. Everyone is aware of it. In fact, apart from a specific celebrity sex tape, the most viewed films on Pornhub are Anastasia Knight's "Playing a Game with Hot Step Sister- Anastasia Knight" and Mandy Flores' "Horny guy fucked his stepmom." However, like with any trend, this was not always the case.

Despite the success of adult film series such as Taboo, family porn was never a popular genre. Even once streaming porn became the standard, it took over a decade to break into the mainstream--as we can see. We can view Pornhub's 2011 website using the Wayback Machine. It's odd to see the top page occupied with a duality of retiring icons and today's starlets at the start of their careers. It portrays a period when the most popular video in 2022 had just 17 million views, a far cry from the 200 million it would get over the following ten years. What else isn't there? Family porn, or "fauxcest" as the adult business loves to call it.

Of course, family porn did not become popular overnight. Part one of this inquiry follows the history of incest in pop culture from Oedipus Rex to Taboo. This article discusses family porn in the streaming era, notably with the establishment of Pornhub and XVideos in 2007. While this may seem to ignore the late 1990s and early 2000s, family porn had reduced to a trickle during that period. It would not witness a surge in popularity until six years after Pornhub's inception. As stated in Part 1, the first family porn movies that are now accessible date back to 2013. Pornhub, ironically, began its "year in review" in 2013, an aggregate blog post that reveals global statistics regarding the website's user base.

The presentation is clearly barebones, particularly in comparison to the following years, based on the chart above. There isn't even a single mention of the terms "Step" or "sister," however MILF does exist. This is significant because without the popularity of MILFs, there may not have been a fauxcest genre.

The word MILF is an abbreviation for "Mom I'd Like to Fuck," as defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "a sexually attractive woman who has children or is in early middle age." I suppose most readers already know that. According to Laurel A. Sutton's Bitches and Skanky Hobags, a linguistic study released in 1995. Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self was coined in the early 1990s on East Californian college campuses. However, it wasn't until 1999's American Pie that the word became popular; there's a moment in it when John Cho (the internet's boyfriend) properly labels Jennifer Coolidge as an 'M-I-L-F, Mom I'd Like to Fuuuck'. Porn producers began generating material centered on MILFs after realizing that this was more than a joke. Since then, the keyword has routinely been in the top five search words on Pornhub, behind only "Lesbian" and "Teen". MILF porn has grown so common that it's common to see actresses in their early twenties portraying MILF roles, frequently against actresses or actors their own age. Despite this popularity, it took longer than anticipated for someone in the adult business to realize that the mum people wanted to fuck was their own.

This chronology corresponds to the audience; according to the Pornhub Year in reviews, millennials were the ones pushing the popularity of fauxcest porn. Or, at the very least, it was sought for by Millennials.

With new nomenclature like "MILF" at their disposal, 30-40-year-olds echoed popular culture in their porn consumption. It's no surprise that, despite the demonization of its fundamental incestuous connection, Game of Thrones became the most popular program on television in the 2010s. Meanwhile, millennials redirected family porn trends to their own proclivities, such as underage actresses. When the family porn trend became popular, it was usually these younger women that portrayed the step-sister role. While the phrase "step sister" did not appear in the Pornhub review in 2013, it grew in prominence over the following year. According to Pornhub's 2014 review, searches for "step-sister" increased 132% in 2013. Step mum increased 94% within the same time, propelling both phrases into the top 15 searches. Not only that, but it seemed that demand surpassed supply. In May 2013, "A Real Mama's Boy," a bootleg clip from a 1973 family porno of the same name, was one of Xvideo's most popular streams. More substance was required to satisfy the audience.

That's partly because the majority of family porn at the time was produced by Forbidden Fruit Films, a production firm founded in 2012 by rising actress Jodi West. West began her pornography profession later than typical, not appearing in films until her mid-40s. She nearly single-handedly brought back family porn in the current era, in addition to combating ageism in the business.

West discusses her past in an interview with Adultdvdtalk. She had a typical life as a real estate agent, with kids, a husband, and everything. However, following her divorce and marriage to her second husband, Jay, the two began web-camming together. West began her career as a MILF before becoming a stepmother in 2012. West also founded Forbidden Fruit Films that year, trademarking the firm (as well as her personal name). She collaborated with Howard Levine, a sales director at Vivid Entertainment, which released Kim Kardashian's sex video in 2007. Another AVN piece from 2013 interviewed the three about Forbidden Fruits Films' sudden success. Levine claims that the company's family-porn DVDs sold out quicker than anything else he'd ever placed on the market. Jay credited this to his and Jodi's focus on capturing the tone of their videos.

"Being a niche studio, our fans are often very specific on what they like to see in our films," he added. Despite refining and developing our filming approach and editing to a more sophisticated level, we have maintained our plot and genuine, amateurish vibe throughout our films." This makes excellent sense, particularly when creating material that focuses on making personal interactions seem as authentic as possible. Forbidden Fruit Films pioneered this approach, laying the groundwork for the rest of the business to follow.

Why did Forbidden Fruit Films succeed with step-family porn rather than faked incest? The Taboo series, in which a mother sleeps with her son, popularised the fauxcest genre in the 1980s. Isn't it really frowned upon to have sex with a family member? In adult circles, a related fetish known as "Twincest" occurs when two individuals who look identical (or are really twins) shoot pornography together. Having said that, Twincest never achieved the supremacy of step-family erotica, and there's a scientific reason for this. The "Westermarck Effect," proposed by the namesake Edward Westermarck in 1891, theorizes that cultural pressure, not biology, is the basis of the incest taboo. Westermarck discovered that children reared together had little to no sexual attraction to each other, whether they were related by blood or adoption. The childhood relationship created between these people disregarded them as sexual partners. It's worth noting that in the majority of family porn, the step-sibling or parent participating is clearly an adult, implying that the actors were not reared together. Because of the Westermarck effect, porn viewers prefer this sort of scenario to one with a real family.

However, there has been criticism of the evidence for the Westermarck Effect--critics who actually increase the logic behind fauxcest's appeal. Before Westermarck died in 1939, Hebraic settlements known as Kibbutzim had grown in popularity in the area that would eventually become Israel. Because these Kibbutzim reared their children communally, researchers saw them as adequate control groups for demonstrating the Westermarck Effect. Marriages between children reared in these Kibbutzim seem to fail at a greater-than-normal rate. While this early finding was favorable to Westermarck's hypothesis, subsequent research confuses Westermarck's approach's usefulness. In 2009, sociologists Dalit Simchai and Eran Shor published "Incest Avoidance, the Incest Taboo, and Social Cohesion: Revisiting Westermarck and the Case of the Israeli Kibbutzim," revealing that previous research had overstated the frequency of sexual attraction between adolescent peers in Kibbutz communities. While Simchai and Shor do not completely dismiss the Westermarck Effect, they argue that social pressure plays a bigger role in incestual avoidance than biological aversion. And, as we all know, pornography's natural cycle is that socially incorrect behaviors become taboo, and taboo becomes a pornographic goldmine. With this information, it's no surprise that step-sister is one of the fastest-rising search terms in Pornhub's history.

However, step-mom was always a more common phrase than step-sister. Only "lesbian" surpassed it in the Pornhub rankings at its height in 2016. Actually, since the inception of Forbidden Fruit Films in 2012, the term "Step-mom" has risen rapidly in the search ranks. Nothing appeared to halt the fauxcest craze, which rose from fourth to fifth place in 2014. Then it happened. Step-mom fell back to fourth position in 2017, followed by step-sister in fifth. Step-sister was no longer among the top searches on Pornhub a year later. This might be due to industry weariness, but it could also be due to over-saturation. Remember that Anastasia Knight's "Playing a Game with Hot Step Sister" is the most watched Pornhub clip; the material was available without having to search for it. However, this does not account for the continued popularity of "step mum" on search engines, where it ranked as the seventh most-searched phrase in 2021. Step mum has held that place since 2019, with no sign that it will reach the same numbers as it did in 2015-2016.

All of this implies that the heyday of family porn may be coming to an end. It makes sense: fresh generations of porn users shape the cultural environment as the decades pass. We're already two years into the 2020s, which means it's time for a new trend to take over. Personally, I'm hoping it's dripping wet.

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